Tant: Will America's patriotism end up strangling our freedoms?

''It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism.''

Ed

Tant

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So begins ''The War Prayer,'' a chilling but clear-eyed view of the horrors of war written nearly a century ago by Mark Twain. America's most beloved author then and now, Twain is today remembered as a humorist, but his humor had a mordant streak back when the 20th century was young. Most readers here at the shaky start of the 21st century do not know that Mark Twain was a true crusader against the scourge of war.

A leader of the Anti-Imperialist League that protested the policies of Republican President William McKinley during America's bloody war in the Philippines, Twain was one of many back then who did not succumb to the propaganda for plunder and plutocracy meted out by the McKinley White House.

''It was indeed a glad and gracious time,'' Twain wrote bitterly in ''The War Prayer,'' ''and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.''

Mark Twain would no doubt be just as sagacious and sarcastic today if he could see how quickly so many of his fellow Americans are eager to torch our freedoms in the holy fire of patriotism while using the American flag as a gag for dissenters and as a blindfold for the rest of the population.

Today Americans mouth platitudes about fighting a war for freedom while being only too willing to trade their freedoms for the false security of Big Brother big government. Just days ago in New York, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner told a law school audience that Americans are ''likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom has ever been in the case in our country.''

The tragedy of Sept. 11 is being compounded by both phony liberals and imitation conservatives. The political climate today could best be described by the poet William Butler Yeats who said, ''The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.''

Author and social critic Noam Chomsky was quite correct when he wrote recently that the crimes of Sept. 11 are ''a gift to the hard jingoist right.''

Indeed, the Bush agenda that might have had an uphill struggle on Capitol Hill now stands a good chance of being rubber stamped by Democrats in Congress who lose their opposition backbones when war clouds gather, the trumpet blares and flags flap in the cold wind of repression.

In a time of war and national crisis, dissenting voices are needed more, not less, so that America does not repeat the mistakes of its past like the ''Red Scares'' of the '20s and '50s or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. A new hysteria is brewing today. Already opinion columnists have been fired from newspapers in Texas and Oregon because they did their jobs and voiced opinions that angered readers who want a lockstep uniformity of opinion here in a land where millions claim to love freedom as long as nobody actually uses it.

Over at the White House, Bush administration media mouthpiece Ari Fleischer joined a cowardly chorus of contempt against late-night TV host Bill Maher who called American missile attacks cowardly.

''People have to watch what they say and watch what they do,'' sneered Press Secretary Fleischer.

When a White House official paid by American taxpayers can tell private citizens to beware of their words and actions, then we all need to remember the wise words of Mark Twain: ''Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.''

Ed Tant has been an activist since 1968 and a journalist in Athens since 1974. Write him at P.O. Box 912, Athens, GA 30603-0912.

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Saturday, October 6, 2001.